In Order To produce iPhone Apps Do I Have To Have All Apple Equipment?

In order to produce iPhone apps do i have to have all Apple equipment? Do i have to have an iPhone? Do i have to have a Mac? Do i have to have both? Should I invest $$$$ before any real success with apps?

It is quite possible to run Mac OS on some kind of a PC.

Option 1

Invest in basic Lion or Leopard DVD, which will cost a not so formidable $29, and install it

A

either as a dual boot, or

B

under VMWare emulator.

Option 2

Find the Mac OS on torrent sites, and download it from there. Then suboptions A or B apply just as above.

How MacOS Runs Under VMware Server

The Leopard under the emulator works, albeit very slowly. Dual boots is also a possibility, I did it before with Windows and Ubuntu, but I prefer the simplicity of Windows booting directly, it is much faster.

The leap to “Mac only” is too much for me. Money aside, I do not want to have two physical computers to work with. And please let this not be a call for Mac evangelists to try to prove to me how that better is.

Mobile Apps As A Business

I do not have an iPhone but I most certainly will have it in the near future. It will probably be second hand, for apps testing purposes mainly. In my contry, I can buy whatever phone I want and use it with any of the three operators. In other countries it will probably be different, having an iPhone may tie you to an operator that you do not want to be tied to.

Let us treat this as a business. If you can make applications that make you money (more than 1K, say), you are in the business; if not, then you are not in this business.

You will not know until you try.

You may also concentrate only on Android devices, see what works for you there and later, if it brings on some money, try to diversify toward Apple products and markets.